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Food quality

Loaded by steps 7, 8  ·  Owns the fats, sugars and sweeteners lists  ·  Applies to every option in every slot

The portion system says how much. This page says which. An option that hits its portion counts using foods from the wrong side of these lists is a failed option, not a compromise.

Real food first

The menu is built on — food recognisable as the thing it came from, cooked from components rather than opened. In practice that means a bias toward plants: vegetables, fruit, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds carry most of the volume, with animal protein present but not central.

Three things follow, and they are enforceable rather than aspirational:

  1. No ultra-processed items appear as options. Anything whose ingredient list carries added sugar, preservatives, emulsifiers, colourings or flavour enhancers is out. This removes most packaged breakfast cereals, most "protein" bars, flavoured yoghurts, processed meat and instant meals.
  2. Variety is a requirement, not a nicety. The four options in a slot should not be four arrangements of the same three ingredients. Across a week the menu should reach a broad spread of plants — the micronutrient coverage that makes a supplement conversation unnecessary comes from this and nothing else.
  3. Whole beats refined, every time. Where the exchange lists name a grain, it is the wholemeal form. There is no white-bread portion.

Fats

Fat quality is where this menu departs most sharply from a generic plan, so the lists are absolute rather than a preference ordering.

  • Olive oil
  • Avocado oil
  • Grapeseed oil
  • Coconut oil
  • Pumpkin seed oil
  • Hemp oil
  • Whole-food fats: avocado, olives, nuts, seeds, tahini
  • Canola / rapeseed oil
  • Sunflower oil
  • Corn oil
  • Soybean oil
  • Margarine

The avoid list is the practical problem, not the use list: those five oils are what almost all Israeli restaurant, bakery and packaged food is made with. The menu cannot control that, and should not pretend to. What it controls is what the client buys and cooks with at home, and that is where the instruction is aimed. Where nut_meals_out is high, say this explicitly in Notes for you rather than writing options the client will eat out of the house anyway.

Frying is not a cooking method this menu uses. Baked, grilled, steamed, roasted, raw.

Hidden sugars

Added sugar is a whole-health problem, and the reason it needs a list is that most of it does not arrive labelled "sugar". Everything below is an added sugar for this menu's purposes:
Plain sugars sugar, brown sugar, demerara, dextrose, glucose, fructose
Syrups
agave, cane syrup, maple, malt extract, glucose-fructose syrup, silan
Concentrated fruit dates, date paste, dried fruit, fruit juice concentrate
Malt
malt, malted barley extract
Sugar alcohols anything ending -tol — sorbitol, maltitol, xylitol, isomalt

Why dates and silan are on this list

They read as natural, and in a different framing they would be. Here they are concentrated free sugar with a fibre content too low to change the insulin response, and they are the single most common way an otherwise careful Israeli diet carries a large added-sugar load. They are not forbidden foods — they are simply not ingredients the menu builds with.

Sugar alcohols are on the list for a different reason: they are a common trigger for bloating and wind. Where the systems review shows either, see Fibre & the gut.

Sweeteners

Where something must be sweetened: stevia, monk fruit, erythritol. Nothing else. Erythritol is a sugar alcohol and is the exception to the rule above — it is tolerated far better than the others, but drop it too if the client reports bloating.

Fibre

25–30 g a day, from food. This has its own page because it interacts with the digestive answers in section 3 — see Fibre & the gut.

Alcohol

The menu allocates no portions to alcohol. Where health_alcohol_units shows regular intake, the Notes for you section states the position once, without elaboration: alcohol is not part of the plan, and what the client does outside the plan is theirs. The agent does not calculate an allowance, negotiate a number, or moralise. If intake reaches a level that is a health matter in its own right, that is a red flag, not a menu adjustment.

The check step 9 runs

Before a menu ships, every named food in every option is checked against this page:

  • No refined grain
  • No oil from the avoid list
  • No added sugar under any of its names
  • No sweetener other than stevia, monk fruit or erythritol
  • No processed meat
  • No fried item
  • No ultra-processed packaged item